Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics

Consumer Guide:
  User's Guide
  Grades 1990-
  Grades 1969-89
  And It Don't Stop
Books:
  Book Reports
  Is It Still Good to Ya?
  Going Into the City
  Consumer Guide: 90s
  Grown Up All Wrong
  Consumer Guide: 80s
  Consumer Guide: 70s
  Any Old Way You Choose It
  Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough
Xgau Sez
Writings:
  And It Don't Stop
  CG Columns
  Rock&Roll& [new]
  Rock&Roll& [old]
  Music Essays
  Music Reviews
  Book Reviews
  NAJP Blog
  Playboy
  Blender
  Rolling Stone
  Billboard
  Video Reviews
  Pazz & Jop
  Recyclables
  Newsprint
  Lists
  Miscellany
Bibliography
NPR
Web Site:
  Home
  Site Map
  Contact
  What's New?
    RSS
Social Media:
  Substack
  Bluesky
  [Twitter]
Carola Dibbell:
  Carola's Website
  Archive
CG Search:
Google Search:

Women's Work

The rhetoric of the antisubject now preoccupies the largely male aesthetes' wing of what I insist on calling pop--shadowy DJs and pseudonymous collectives mixmastering aural wallpaper from digital sound manipulators. But in 1996 more than ever, it was women engaged by the human struggle of subject construction who came up with striking and durable music, usually in formally received guises: unexpected 37-year-old singer-songwriter Amy Rigby, or such punks manqué as Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna, Fluffy's Amanda Rootes, and Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker. And to remind us that the worthiest social tendency exacts its social cost, we also got the awestruck self-regard of unexpected 22-year-old singer-songwriter Jewel and the kitchen-sink ska manqué of No Doubt's Gwen Stefani.

Artforum, 1997